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Journal of Language Relationship • Вопросы языкового родства • 1 (2009) • pp. 155 – 162

ABC Etymological Dictionary of Old ChineseBy Axel SchuesslerHonolulu: University of Hawai’i Press. 2007. xx + 668 pp.

George Starostin

(Russian State University for the Humanities)

Appearing somewhat surreptitiously and certainly lacking the proper publicity, Axel Schuessler’s

Etymological Dictionary of Old Chinese is, in fact, arguably the biggest thing that has so far hap-

pened to Chinese historical linguistics studies in the 21st century. Finally, the scholarly world has

come into possession of a worthy reference source on the history and origins of a significant portion

of Old Chinese vocabulary — the first such source ever published. Regardless, then, of whether

Prof. Schuessler’s work is flawless or not, it constitutes a major landmark in the history of Sinol-

ogy, and will serve as the benchmark by which many, if not most, further works dealing with the

history of the Chinese language will have to be judged.

With an immense baggage of knowledge on both the internal developments and the external

connections of Chinese accumulated over the last century by dozens of specialists, Chinese and

Western alike, the appearance of such a dictionary was, of course, a historical inevitability. Today,

the Sino-Tibetan affiliation of Chinese is no longer disputed as it once used to be, and, with the ac-

knowledged status of Austronesian, Austro-Asiatic, Hmong-Mien (Miao-Yao), and Tai-Kadai lan-

guage families as forming strong areal rather than genetic connections with Chinese, it has become

generally clear how to treat these connections from a methodological point of view. Moreover, the

fact that the idea of finally compiling and publishing a proper etymological dictionary of Old Chi-

nese was carried out by none other than Prof. Schuessler is quite auspicious, since he is one of the

biggest Western authorities on Chinese historical linguistics; his earlier “Dictionary of Early Zhou

Chinese” is easily the finest resource in existence on this archaic and, even today, least understood

and well-studied (but most important for various philological studies) period of the Chinese lan-guage, and, over the past several decades, he has made numerous valuable contributions to the study

of Chinese historical phonology, grammar, and external linguistic relations.

Several important and useful features of the dictionary should be stressed at once. First, it is pre-

ceded by a detailed, 150-page long introduction that carefully explains the structure of the work, the

methodological principles underlying it, and the general linguistic situation in and around Ancient

China as assumed by the author for the times when Old Chinese was still a spoken language. On an

equally significant note, we get a thorough description of the author’s view on the phonological and

morphological structure of Old Chinese, as well as the origins of this structure, reconstructed through

comparison with other branches of the Sino-Tibetan family. This is particularly meaningful inasmuch

as no general consensus has so far been reached by linguists on many of the raised issues, and it is

very important for specialists and casual readers alike to learn more about the motivation behindmany (if not most) of Prof. Schuessler’s etymologies offered in the main body of the work.

Concerning this main body, primary emphasis is placed on making the work a word-based

rather than character-based dictionary — a decision with which most Sinologists, no doubt, will

heartily concur. Relying too heavily on the graphic form of the etyma would make the reader miss

many obvious (and some not so obvious) connections between words that, already from the earliest

times, were written with different Chinese characters, yet were nevertheless etymologically re-

lated — or, vice versa, assume false connections between words of entirely different etymological

origin, whose only similarity was in that the same character used for one word would also be used

for a different one due to phonetic similarity between the two.

The dictionary is, therefore, structured according to the phonetic principle, with all the words

arranged in the order of their modern pinyin readings. A separate character index would have been

nice, but is not obligatory provided one knows the primary reading of the character; characters de-

noting derived words whose etymologies are inseparable from etymologies of other (‛primary’)

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words simply refer to these words. E. g., a search for the etymology of 豹 bào ‛leopard’ will lead

the reader to the entry bào 豹→ bó 駁, which should be read: “bào ‛leopard’ is originally derived

from bó ‛variegated’, see under bó”. This is a fairly reasonable approach.

The overall structure of the entry, besides the expected reconstruction for Middle Chinese and

Old Chinese (usually several distinct stages of the latter) and the etymological section, usually in-

cludes other valuable information, such as attested dialect forms and/or transcriptions of the etymon

in question in such medieval sources as the ’Phags-pa transcribed Měnggǔ Zìyùn [蒙古字韻]. Thelatter information, as the author correctly remarks, may occasionally shed light on the word’s later

development. However, it is provided somewhat inconsistently.

Obviously, no matter how ample our knowledge on Chinese etymology may be at present, mul-

tiple Old Chinese stems still lack any kind of historical explanation. Such words are simply omitted

from the dictionary altogether, so the reader should not expect to open it in the hopes of finding at

least something about any character ever recorded in attested Old Chinese sources.

Aside from a somewhat clumsy system of abbreviations (a problem exacerbated by the fact that

different types of abbreviations are decoded in fairly distant parts of the book, so that it takes a fair

amount of time to properly understand the contents of each entry), the general layout of the diction-

ary is, therefore, almost impeccable. Much more complicated, but, of course, also much more im-

portant is the issue of properly evaluating its scientific content.

We should begin with the obligatory remark that the creation of an etymological dictionary for Old

Chinese runs into a set of problems quite different from the ones involved in the creation of, for instance,

an etymological dictionary for any given Indo-European language. First, Old Chinese itself is, essentially,

a reconstructed language, at least in its phonological (and partially morphological) aspects; therefore, be-

fore comparing Old Chinese forms to their hypothetical cognate forms in other Sino-Tibetan languages or

their hypothetical ancestors in non-Sino-Tibetan languages from which they are supposed to have been

borrowed, it is necessary to have a solid historical justification for the Chinese form itself.

Second, unlike Indo-European, Proto-Sino-Tibetan has yet to be properly reconstructed. Despite

significant progress in this field, achieved through the work of scholars such as P. Benedict, R. Schafer,

N. C. Bodman, W. S. Coblin, S. Starostin, I. Peiros and others, unresolved issues in Tibeto-Burman,let alone Sino-Tibetan, linguistics still abound, with several competing versions of Sino-Tibetan pho-

nology, multiple languages and whole subgroups still linked to the main “bulk” of Sino-Tibetan only

by a few suggested cognates, and no definitive corpus of Sino-Tibetan etymologies; the only exten-

sive comparative dictionary of Sino-Tibetan languages in existence is I. Peiros’ and S. Starostin’s

“Comparative Vocabulary of Five Sino-Tibetan Languages”, which is a very serious piece of work,

but, with only five languages involved, is obviously not enough. Thus, any etymological dictionary of

Old Chinese will, by definition, rest on a somewhat shaky foundation, since it will be attempting to

link the Chinese forms to a family that has not yet been properly reconstructed itself.

Third, there is still nothing like a universally accepted scenario for both prehistorical and historical

contacts between speakers of Old Chinese and speakers of other language families. At best, everyone

recognizes the reality of such a contact between the Chinese (including “proto-Chinese”) and variousmembers of the hypothetical “Austric” macro-family, but the exact chronological, geographical, and

quantitative scale of most of these contacts is far from being established. Numerous resemblances be-

tween Old Chinese and Tai-Kadai (or Hmong-Mien, or Mon-Khmer, ¤c. ¤c.) etyma have been spotted

by researchers, and much of this evidence has been painstakingly documented in Prof. Schuessler’s

work, but for quite a few of them we still cannot definitely establish, for instance, the direction of bor-

rowing, or even an approximate time and place in which the borrowing occurred (provided it is indeed

a borrowing, and not a chance resemblance, or a trace of some older, deep-level relationship).

All of these complex factors have to be kept in mind by whoever wishes to use Prof. Schuessler’s

book as a reliable reference source. The biggest limitation (one for which Prof. Schuessler certainly

cannot be held responsible), is that this is, indeed, the first etymological dictionary of Old Chinese —

and, like all first etymological dictionaries of any language or language family, it is only the first step in

the direction of producing a thorough deciphering of the prehistory of the Chinese lexicon. Most of the

etymologies have to be taken with a grain of salt, not because they are unrealistic or seriously violate

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any principles of comparative Sinology or comparative linguistics as a whole (such cases are quite

rare), but simply because there is a high chance that better, more convincing etymologies will replace

them in the future, as our knowledge of the linguistic situation in South-East Asia steadily increases.

In order to clarify this statement, it is perhaps reasonable to voice some specific concerns on

each of the three issues raised above.

The basic foundation for all of the etymologies offered in the dictionary is the reconstructed Old

Chinese (OC) form. At present, the two most comprehensive reconstructions for Old Chinese, availablein published form, are Baxter ([1992]) and Starostin ([1989]); both are remarkably similar in many re-

spects, especially concerning the treatment of OC finals, but significantly differ in others, such as proposed subsystems of OC initials. For the most part, Schuessler’s version of OC is compatible with Bax-

ter’s, although he proposes quite a few of his own modifications to the system, at the same time keeping

in touch with more recent hypotheses by L. Sagart ([1999]) and others. Starostin’s work is mostly ig-

nored (odd enough, Starostin ([1989]) is not even mentioned in the bibliography!), which is a pity, since

many of the hypotheses presented there make a lot of sense from a general Sino-Tibetan perspective (e. g.

the reconstruction of a phonological opposition between simple and palatalized affricates and fricatives,

which, according to Starostin, is a good match for the same opposition in Tibetan and Lolo-Burmese).An even worse problem is that, despite the length of the introduction, the reader does not get a

very coherent picture of the phonological structure of Old Chinese as a whole. There is no general in-ventory table for OC, nor do we get a strict and compact set of rules to let us easily understand the tran-

sition from OC to Middle and Modern Chinese. In a rather chaotic way, chapters that deal with OC

phonology take, as their point of departure, either OC itself (“Initial consonants”, “Final consonants”),

or Middle Chinese (“MC tones and their Old Chinese equivalents”, “Initial and medial j and the MCdivisions”), so that the relevant information sometimes gets doubled or even tripled in several loca-

tions. Discussion can easily branch from OC to either its descendants (MC), ancestors (Sino-Tibetan)

or contacts (Austro-Asiatic, Tai, ¤c.); it would have probably been a better choice to treat all these con-

nections separately and more systematically, especially considering that many of the statements made

in these sections are debatable, and a clearer presentation of them is essential for further research.

The methodology of the reconstruction itself occasionally suffers from relying too heavily on

isolated pieces of potential evidence that do not seem to form a coherent system. This is a very important point, since Old Chinese phonology has, for the most part, been established through a very

specific brand of internal reconstruction, and one of the perils of internal reconstruction is that it

generally relies much more on subjective judgement than external reconstruction, based on identify-

ing regular phonetic correspondences between related languages. In reconstructing the phonology of

OC, our most reliable sources are those whose statistic significance is unquestionable, namely, datagained from the analysis of OC rhymes and well-represented xiesheng (phonoideographic) series of

Chinese characters. Unsurprisingly, it is the conclusions gained from these types of data that are

among the less controversial among specialists on OC reconstruction.

Unfortunately, recent research on OC tends to focus on less reliable data — such as various iso-

lated “oddities” of the xiesheng series; approximate phonetic glosses in Han-time dictionaries of Chi-

nese characters; and, worst of all, on the analysis of so-called “word families” — etymological group-ings of characters based on similarities in their pronunciation and meaning, even when these similari-

ties do not seem to form easily explainable patterns. This dense mixture of subjective judgement on the

part of both ancient Chinese and modern Western philologists inevitably leads to multiple complica-

tions of the existing reconstruction that do not have sufficient backing, and vary greatly from scholar to

scholar, at the same time confusing the student and making him/her question the more solid parts of

OC reconstruction as well, even up to rejecting the possibility of such a reconstruction altogether.

Fortunately for students and scholars alike, Prof. Schuessler’s approach to OC is far more “mod-erate” than, e. g., Laurent Sagart’s ([1999]), or, in certain respects, even that of B. Karlgren (good

examples of Karlgren’s exaggerated reliance on “word-families” are adduced on p. 8 of the dictionary).

Nevertheless, I would still consider it way too dependent on subjective judgement. Thus, on the same

p. 8, we meet with the following statement:

“For example, it seems obvious that the words jiàn 監 *krâms ‛look at’ and lǎn 覽 *râmʔ ‛to

see’ are related, but what the difference in later tones and the presence / absence of an initial *k-

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might have entailed is so far a matter of speculation. On the other hand, we can confidently state

that zhì 織 *tǝkh or *tǝks, literally ‛something that has been woven’, is a regular exopassive deriva-

tion from zhī 織 *tǝk ‛to weave’. We consider both jiàn and lǎn, and zhī and zhì to be allofams in

their respective word families”.

The last sentence, in my opinion, constitutes a grave methodological error. It is clear, both to the

reader and to the author, that the two examples described above are of an entirely different nature —

the latter being one example in a general pattern that can be illustrated by multiple additional examples, the former being merely a subjective similarity that does not form part of any subsystem; how

much more ‛obvious’ does it really seem that jiàn and lǎn are related than, for example, English rod

and p-rod (the former is, of course, something you prod with), or drain and s-train, two words whose

meanings seriously overlap in some contexts, but which nevertheless have entirely different etymolo-

gies? We should also keep in mind that, although OC was unquestionably much richer in phonemic

inventory than its modern descendants, and more permissible in its phonotactics, the number of al-

lowed syllables was still limited, and the overall degree of homonymity in it (including homonyms

with similar meanings) must have been greater than in the European languages we are used to.

From a methodological standpoint, then, it seems more reasonable for the moment to keep

words like jiàn and lǎn apart rather than place them under the same etymon (as the author does on

p. 305) — thus creating the illusion that there exists some kind of true scientific evidence to consider

them “allofams”. The same recommendation can be applied to dozens, if not hundreds, of etymologi-

zations offered in the main body of the dictionary. An extreme example is KA ‛solid, hard’ (p. 261),

which, according to the author, serves as the basis of a whole bunch of stems like ka-k , ka-ng , ka-r,

ka-n, ¤c., with meanings like ‛hard; solid; strong; dry; withered; freeze’, scattered throughout Chi-

nese, Tibeto-Burman, and even Mon-Khmer languages — but for most of the quoted examples, there

is no real evidence other than a purely intuitive feeling that they really descend from a single ances-

tor *KA, and, as of now, I see no other possibility than to regard all of them as separate roots.

Sometimes this liberal policy on word-families leads to a fair amount of confusion in particular

etymological entries. Thus, although there is a connection proposed between bīng 冰 (OC * prǝŋ)

‛ice’ and líng 凌 (OC *rǝŋ) id., with both placed under the same entry (p. 168), it is impossible toreconcile this connection with the proposed etymology: the author reasonably relates OC * prǝŋ to

PTB * pam ‛snow, ice’, but this means that p- in OC * prǝŋ is part of the root, not a prefix (contra[Sagart 1999]); what, then, does the p-less form *rǝŋ represent? To answer this question, the author

has to substitute his own reconstruction for W. Baxter’s, respectively 冰 * prjǝŋ and 凌 *b-rjǝŋ;

however, since Baxter’s clusters like b-r-, ¤c., are also fairly controversial, he then reverts back to

his own reconstruction, tentatively suggesting a semantically remote Austro-Asiatic origin for the

forms and stating that ‘the unusual initial alternation p ~ r also speaks for a non-ST origin’. So which

etymology is preferable — the ST one or the Austro-Asiatic one? And if it is the latter, do the two

forms represent independent borrowings from different Austro-Asiatic sources and / or into different

OC dialects? Under these conditions, it would seem more reasonable to separate the two words.

Another problem is drawing questionable conclusions from several disconnected pieces of hy- pothetic evidence, which also happen to contradict other evidence. A case in point here is the

author’s reconstruction of an initial consonant cluster *ml- in OC (pp. 89 – 90). It has long been rec-

ognized that the initial lateral resonant in OC gives bifurcated reflexes in MC: OC *l- > MC j- in

most cases, but also dź- in a smaller group of examples. Prof. Schuessler attempts to explain the

difference by setting up an OC cluster *ml- (or, rather, *m-l-, which he separates from the unhy-

phenated *ml-; the phonetic difference between the two is left unexplained), for which MC dź- is

the regular reflexation, and gives various examples of both proposed Tibeto-Burman cognates and

Miao-Yao borrowing sources that seem to confirm this reconstruction.

The problem, of course, is that for most of these cognates, we are not really sure they have to be

reconstructed with an initial *m- for Proto-Sino-Tibetan. Thus,

食*m-lǝk ‛eat’ is compared with PTB

*m-lyak ‛to lick’, but there is almost no evidence, except for a few scattered Kuki-Chin forms, that the

PTB form indeed contained an initial *m-. The same goes for PTB *(m-)loŋ ‛canoe’ (the PTB recon-

struction here and in most other places is taken directly from [Benedict 1972]) > Kuki-Naga *m-lauŋ,

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but no m- is found in any other TB language. About the only good example in this group is PTB * m-

lay ‛tongue’ (where sufficient evidence is found in more than one Tibeto-Burmese subgroup to assert

that m- really reflects an old state of affairs rather than a local innovation) = OC 舐 *m-leʔ ‛to lick’,

but it goes without saying that a hypothesis cannot be solidly based on but one example of such a kind.

Two more examples show how MC dź- < OC *m-l- is connected with words with initial prenasalized

consonants in Miao-Yao: MC 秫 dźjuet ‛glutinous millet’ < > MY *nblut ‛glutinous, sticky’; MC 舌

dźjät ‛tongue’ < OC *m-let < > Yao *byet 6

, Miao *nplai6

id. However, the two Miao-Yao parallels ad-duced here are actually quite different. The former, according to [Peiros 1998: 141], is PMY *mblVt > PM

*mblo-Q (Hmu nǝ, Hmong mplou), PY *mblut (Mien bjut , Kimmun blɔt ). Borrowing from an early an-

cestor of PMY is likely here, with OC *lut or *(m-)lut having no better etymology. On the other hand, the

PMY form for ‛tongue’, also according to Peiros, is rather *mbret > PM *mblǝ-Q (Hmu ni, Hmong

mplai), but PY *mbjet (Mien bjet , Kimmun bjɛt ). The two types of correspondences are not distinguished

in [Wang ¤ Mao: 1995] (in both cases, *mbl- is reconstructed for PMY), but they do exist, and a recon-

struction like *mbret is ingood agreement with other types of correspondences where PM *-l- or *-r- is the

equivalent of PY *-j- (see [Peiros 1998: 136 – 137] for the full set). Furthermore, Prof. Schuessler seems

to agree with this, as he quotes the PMY reconstruction for ‛tongue’ as *nbret rather than *nblet (p. 467).

Thus, if PMY ‛tongue’ is really *mbret (or *nbret ), there is no solid ground for assuming that

the word has anything to do with OC舌 *(m-)let ‛tongue’; it is not clear why OC *ml- should have

been borrowed as PMY *mbr- instead of *m(b)l- proper.

A further scrap of “evidence” for OC m-l- is allegedly found within Chinese itself: since OC繩*lǝŋ ‛string’ > MC dźjǝŋ uses the character 黽 mrǝŋʔ ‛toad’ > MC mɛŋ as phonetic, it has to be recon-

structed as *m-lǝŋ (and this is in agreement with MC dź- as a proper reflexation of OC m-l-). However,

it is not mentioned that the same phonetic series also includes such a well-known character as MC蠅 jiǝŋ ‛fly’, which, according to the author’s own rules, could not have contained an initial *m- in OC,

since it is MC jiǝŋ, not dźjǝŋ. So this character has to be reconstructed as OC *lǝŋ or * jǝŋ (p. 576) —

which makes the preceding argument hollow, since it proves that not every character in this phonetic

series has to contain an initial m-, and that OC繩 *lǝŋ rather than *m-lǝŋ would be perfectly accept-

able for it. In fact, the connection between *C-r- / *C-l- and *r- / *l-type syllables within the same pho-netic series need not necessarily presuppose that the *r-/*l -type syllables necessarily or almost neces-

sarily go back to *C-r-/*C-l-type syllables as well; this idea, upheld by W. Baxter ([1992]) and L. Sa-

gart ([1999]), occasionally has some interesting applications, but cannot function as a universal rule.

Additional concerns: if it is indeed true that MC dź- < OC *m-l-, whereas MC j- < OC *l-, how

do we explain numerous “doublets” attested in MC dictionaries which, for the exact same charac-

ters in the exact same meanings, give both j- and dź- (a good list can be found in [Starostin 1989:

514])? Do they all represent OC alternations between l- and m-l-? And also, what do we do with

various potential TB cognates for OC words with *(m-)l- > MC dź- that have no traces of an initial

nasal whatsoever? E. g., the author gives OC贖 *m-luk > MC dźjwok ‛to ransom’ = Written Ti-

betan blu-ba, blu-s ‛to buy off, ransom’, saying that “the WT forms can theoretically derive from

earlier *mlu(t)”; but he does not mention the quite possibly related Kachin gǝ-lo ‛to settle, pay anindemnity’ or Lushai hloʔ ‛wages, salary’, or Kiranti *lòk ‛lend’, with no nasals anywhere; also, if

Tibetan bl- < ml-, why doesn’t any other example in Schuessler’s group contain Tibetan bl- to con-

firm this? Finally, some very reasonable etymologies seem to be rejected simply because they do

not fit in with the rule, e. g. OC乘 *lǝŋ ‛to mount, ascend’ > MC dźjǝŋ = Tibetan laŋ ‛rise, get up’,

Kachin luŋ ‛ascend’ ([Peiros ¤ Starostin 1996: III: 19], not quoted in the dictionary).

Overall,with virtually no internal evidence for OC *m-l-, and the external evidence being inconsistent,

controversial, and contradictory, it feels more prudent to simply scrap the whole thing — for the moment,

at least, until it becomes possible to present a more convincing structure. Currently, however, it is more

reasonable to simply admit a dialectal variation reason for the bifurcation of OC *l- into dź- and j- in MC.

Speaking of dialectal variation, another minor flaw of the dictionary is that occasionally, theo-

retical statements are made that do not seem to have sufficient basis in fact and may give a some-

what misleading picture of the historical development of Chinese. Thus, on p. 7 the author intro-

duces the concept of “rural dialects”, saying that “words with rare and unusual features typically

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have meanings with a rustic or vulgar flavour”. He then lists the following words as “rural” or “vul-

gar” (identified on the basis of having initial x- < OC voiceless resonants instead of expected regu-

lar reflexes): “beard, to face / toward, ribs (of a horse), to know, to vomit, to rear animals, stupid, to

roar, tiger, pig”. While the general explanation of x-containing words as dialectal varieties may be

true, it is absolutely not clear what exactly is so “rural” or “vulgar” about notions like “beard”, “to

face”, “to know”, or “tiger”. Further below, we also learn that words like “old man”, “to fall” (!),

and “wrist” also “conjure up a rural sphere” (although other quoted words, like “farm” and “sickle”,certainly could do that). It is simply hard to understand why it is necessary to set up and insist on

the “rural” vs. “non-rural” (urban?) distinction when the data do not confirm it.

Already in our discussion of the hypothetical OC *m-l-, we have indicated certain problems

with TB etymologies for supposed OC cognates that crop up in the dictionary. Fortunately, they are

not ubiquitous, and in most cases, TB cognates are reasonable both from the phonetic and semantic

sides. Not all the known etymologies are quoted; where formerly proposed etymologies contradict

the author’s ideas on phonetic correspondences between OC and TB, they are usually omitted. This

is understandable, but, again, one should keep in mind that the development from PST to OC as

traced (in a rather chaotic form) in the introduction is not the final word on Sino-Tibetan, and that

various alternative hypotheses to some of the proposed solutions are quite probable. Thus, the idea

that aspirated consonants in OC are of a secondary origin (and, therefore, we should not look for

specific TB correspondences to OC aspirates) is mostly based on “word family” hypotheses and

ideas of sound symbolism that are controversial and unprovable (pp. 58 – 61); Benedict’s earlier ex-

planation of OC unaspirated stops as reflecting traces of lost prefixes ([Benedict 1972: 165]) or

Starostin’s even more complex set of rules to explain the interaction between voiced, voiceless,

and aspirated articulation in ST ([Starostin 1989: 136 – 146, ¤c.) both seem more preferable.

Concerning those etymologies of Chinese words for which an external, non-ST source has been

suggested, some of the methodological problems that inevitably crop up here are already well de-

scribed by the author himself on pp. 9 – 10 (“Identification of cognates”) and need not be addressed

further in this review. One thing, however, that must be mentioned is that the author’s historical sce-

nario for contacts between Chinese speakers and speakers of other language families seems to beseriously incomplete. Throughout the dictionary, he most prominently quotes such potential sources

or targets of borrowing as Austro-Asiatic, Tai-Kadai, and Miao-Yao languages. These are, indeed,

almost universally recognized as donors to / recipients from OC, although nobody has so far pre-

sented a coherent chronological model of these contacts. However, while almost overstating the im-

portance of these contacts, he insists that “other language families” had “little contact with Chinese”

(p. 133). This can hardly be so, at least in respect to two other prominent families:

(a) Austronesian. Numerous similarities between Austronesian and Chinese have been spotted

by L. Sagart, who has even ventured so far as to postulate a genetic relationship between the two

based on these connections (the so-called ‘Sino-Austronesian’ theory). In reality, most of the con-

nections can be explained in contact and areal terms (with a few ones possibly indicating some ul-

tra-deep level relation), but they are so numerous that ignoring them altogether is hardly a good so-lution. Thus, for OC土 *thâʔ ‛earth’ we are told that “there is no obvious cognate and etymology”

(p. 502), apart from a few phonetically dubious Austro-Asiatic parallels, but, in fact, there is a per-

fectly fine Austronesian connection: cf. PAN *-taq ‛earth, soil’ [Sagart 2002: 6]. Apart from Sa-

gart’s works, numerous examples on Chinese-Austronesian or, wider, Sino-Tibetan-Austronesian

connections are given in [Peiros 1998] and other sources.

(b) Altaic. The idea that speakers of Altaic languages (or, if one does not subscribe to the Altaic

theory, Turkic, Mongolic, Tungus-Manchu, and “pre-Korean” languages) had little or no contact

with the earliest Chinese speakers is very odd, considering that nearly all the lands to the north of the

Yellow River must have been populated with predominantly Altaic speakers long before the Chinese

actually settled in its basin, and that epigraphic and historical records in China are full of references

to contacts with nomadic tribes of the North that, in all probability, spoke Altaic languages.

It is true that the issue of Altaic-Chinese language contacts has been relatively unexplored, due

to a variety of factors such as:

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— typological dissimilarities between Altaic languages and Chinese, making such comparison

less comfortable than the one between Chinese and more “compatible” languages such as Tai-Kadai

or Mon-Khmer;

— emphasis on later, historical period contacts between Han-time Chinese and Turkic / Mon-

golic tribes, obscuring earlier contacts;

— lack of direct prehistorical knowledge (earlier than the first centuries A. D.) about the ances-

tors of Turkic, Mongolic, ¤c., and the never-ending debate about the status of the Altaic connection. Nevertheless, all of these problems are purely technical and psychological, and many of them

can now be overcome with the appearance of An Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages([EDAL]); material from this source can be used for productive comparison with reconstructed OC

forms even if one is skeptical about Altaic as a whole, since it also includes reconstructions for

uncontested branches. A few examples of why exploring the Altaic connection is a must for further

Sinologic studies, taken from [Starostin 2007], will suffice:

(a) For 兔 tù ‛hare’ Schuessler offers an OC reconstruction *lhâh, saying that “the OC initial

*lh- is revealed by the graph’s use as phonetic in a word for ‛tiger’ in Zuǒzhuàn” (p. 502). However,

there is no such character as- in attested versions of the Zuǒzhuàn. The character in question is

found in the Shuōwén, where it is defined as part of the Chǔ word for ‛tiger’,烏-. The Zuǒzhuàn

quotes obviously the same word as於菟, whereas the Hànshū (not the Hòu Hànshū, as stated on

p. 282 of the dictionary) quotes it as於檡; for the latter Schuessler gives the modern reading yú-

shì < MC ʔjwo-śjäk , but in this particular use, the Jíyùn apparently gives the MC reading ʔjwo-duo

> modern yú-tú. What this all leads to is to state that there is no obvious connection between the

regular OC form for tiger,虎 *hlâʔ , and the above dialectal word for ‛tiger’, which could have easily

been OC *ʔa-dâ(k) instead of the suggested *ʔa-lhak .

This, in turn, means that the word for ‛hare’, which Schuessler reconstructs as OC *lhâh, may eas-

ily have been *thâh or even an earlier *thâks. If so, then the connection with Middle Korean twos(ki)

‛hare’ is more complex than a borrowing ‘from Chinese in connection with the animal cycle’. The Ko-

rean word finds a good Altaic parallel in Proto-Tungus-Manchu *tuksa- ‛hare’ ([EDAL: 1451]), which, in

turn, is in that language derived from a verbal stem with the meaning ‛to run’. Thus, it is, in fact, the Chi-nese word that is more likely to represent an old borrowing from an Altaic source rather than vice versa.

(b) OC 麥 *mrǝk ‛wheat’ is compared to Tibetan bra-bo ‛buckwheat’ and possibly also to

Proto-Lolo-Burmese * g-ra id. (p. 374); this etymology, despite the obvious phonetic issues (final -k ,

m- / b- alternation, ¤c.), could be acceptable if no other were available, but cf. Tungus-Manchu

*murgi ‛barley’, Middle Korean mír ‛wheat’, Old Japanese mugji ‛wheat, barley’ < Altaic *m urgu([EDAL: 935]). With three consonantal segments matching, this seems a more likely solution.

(c) OC敵 *dêk ‛enemy’ is compared to PTB *m-ta:y ‛avenge, retaliate’ (p. 209), but cf. rather

Turkic * jagɨ ‛enemy, war’, Mongolic *dajin ‛war’ < Altaic *dàgì ([EDAL: 457]).

Additionally, in [Starostin 2007] one can find reasonable Altaic etymologies for several im-

portant items in Chinese lexicon that are altogether lacking in Prof. Schuessler’s dictionary — such

as琴 qín ‛qin, musical instrument’,鵲 què ‛magpie’, and even the famous “Chinese unicorn”麒麟qílín (traced back to an Altaic word for ‛deer’). Not all the etymologies offered there will find accep-

tance, but cases like these, nevertheless, seem to disprove, once and for all, the idea that it is fruitless

to include Altaic in the list of potential “donors” to the Chinese language.

Concluding this review, I would once again like to stress that all of the issues raised here do not

in any way diminish the general importance of the work. On the contrary, even where one might feel

the author has missed some valid data, or has jumped to unwarranted conclusions, this should still

constitute a stimulus for discussion and improvement rather than a pretext to dismiss the work alto-

gether. My only concern is that scholars and students that are not well-versed in historical Chinese and

Sino-Tibetan studies may make the mistake of taking this dictionary for the definitive word on Chi-

nese etymology, which it most certainly is not. I would not, therefore, recommend it for “blind” usage

to any such student or scholar. However, if one approaches it with due caution, keeping in mind most

of the caveats that have been voiced above, it will certainly be a valuable aid in any kind of research

that has to do with the history of Chinese language, be it linguistics, philology, or history as such.

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R e f e r e n c e s

BAXTER 1992 ― William H. Baxter. A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology. Mouton – de Gruyter,

Berlin – New York, 1992.

BENEDICT 1972 ― P. K. Benedict. Sino-Tibetan: A Conspectus. Cambridge University Printing House,

1972.

EDAL ― S. Starostin, A. Dybo, O. Mudrak. An Etymological Dictionary of Altaic Languages. HdOVol. 8-1, 8-2, 8-3. Leiden: Brill, 2003.

PEIROS 1998 ― I. Peiros. Comparative Linguistics in Southeast Asia \ Pacific Linguistics Series,

Vol. 142. Australian National University, Canberra, 1998.

PEIROS & STAROSTIN 1996 ― I. Peiros, S. Starostin. A Comparative Vocabulary of Five Sino-Tibetan

Languages (6 vols.). Melbourne, 1996.

SAGART 1999 ― L. Sagart. The Roots of Old Chinese \ Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, Vol. 184.,

Amsterdam – Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.

SAGART 2002 ― L. Sagart. Sino-Tibeto-Austronesian: an Updated and Improved Argument . Paper

presented at inth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics (ICAL9). 8 – 11 Janu-

ary 2002. Canberra, Australia.

STAROSTIN 1989 ― С. А. Старостин. Реконструкция древнекитайской фонологической системы[ A Reconstruction of the Old Chinese Phonological System]. Moscow, “Nauka”, 1989.

STAROSTIN 2007 ― S. A. Starostin. Altaic and Chinese \ С. А. Старостин. Труды по языкозна-

нию. М.: «Языки Славянской Культуры» [Works on Linguistics. Moscow: “Languages of Slavic

Culture”]; pp. 850 – 853.

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